This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

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Friday, October 23, 2009

Darwinism and academic culture: So now we admit there are problems?

A friend draws my attention to this paper by a materialist, in which we read,

"Incremental changes in an existing biological structure the alterations in beak shape of the finches that so impressed Charles Darwin during his voyage to the Galapagos Islands, for instance - can indeed be attributed to natural selection. Even most creationists do not deny this. But when it comes to the innovation of entirely new structures (‘‘morphological novelties’’) such as segmentally organized bodies (seen in earthworms, insects, and vertebrates such as humans, but not jellyfish or molluscs), or the hands and feet of tetrapods (vertebrates with four limbs), Darwin’s mechanism comes up short. This is a reality that is increasingly acknowledged by biologists, particularly those working in the field of evolutionary developmental biology, or ‘‘EvoDevo.’’ "

“Derision of a traditionalist segment of the public for not immediately jumping into line with standard selectionist narratives (however far-fetched they may be), is not the answer here. The scientific mainstream should rightly be prevailing in the evolution debate, since the living world is manifestly a product of evolution. But it and its liberal advocates are so wedded to a neo-Darwinism that has effectively become the house philosophy of the market economy that they are barely holding on in their attempts to prevent naturalistic accounts of the history of life from being expunged from school curricula. Unless the discourse around evolution is opened up to scientific perspectives beyond Darwinism, the education of generations to come is at risk of being sacrificed for the benefit of a dying theory.”

Much of SCIENCE AT THE CROSSROADS: Evolution: The Public’s Problem, and the Scientists’ by Stuart A. Newman is nonsense, but the author has certainly got one thing right: People don't believe it because it is not believable.

Newman, if you do not have a better story (and you obviously don't), it is okay to say you don't know. I don't either. But please discourage people from insulting the public any more with the Big Spenders or Big Bazooms theories of human evolution.